We are delighted to have earned our first Azure Advanced Specialisation, a significant milestone in our strategic partnership with Microsoft. The ‘Modernisation of Web Applications to Microsoft Azure’ specialisation validates our extensive experience and proven expertise in migrating and modernising production application workloads in Azure.

As businesses look to take full advantage of cloud as a modern delivery platform for products, services and experiences, they need partners with advanced skills to help them modernise their applications through migration, optimisation and in some cases, native rebuilding.

This specialisation allows Microsoft partners with an existing Gold Cloud Platform Competency to further differentiate their capability and stand out competitively, placing Ascent in an elite tier of Microsoft partners (~50 worldwide in early 2021).

Our teams enjoyed a rigorous independent audit that tested our deployment and management practices against Microsoft’s technical standards.

Nicki Aitken, Ascent’s Microsoft Business Manager, is delighted with the achievement (and keen to get onto the next one). “It’s a significant moment for Ascent in terms of our roadmap with Microsoft. With ambitious plans for the next 18 months, this will be the first of many Advanced Specialisations we secure as we continue to invest in developing our extensive application and data capabilities on Azure.”

Stewart Smythe, Ascent’s CEO, comments, “Since 2005, Ascent has designed, built and managed demanding customer solutions on Azure. Consequently, our knowledge of the platform and its service ecosystem is very strong – and it’s great for our teams and customers to have this independently validated. I’m immensely proud of our ability to help customers unlock value and remove technical limitations, helping their businesses advance and succeed. We see a really clear link between technology and a business’s mission and purpose - Ascent shares Microsoft’s vision and passion for the role that transformative technology has to play in creating opportunity and addressing broader environmental, economic and societal challenges.”